Who is the ChiefHomeOfficer?

YOU are - or anyone who works from home. Whether you're a full-time 1099er, a corporate teleworking W-2er, a part-time eBayer, or any head-of-household handling family, finances and affairs from a corner desk - and in search of a little balance in the home office, then ChiefHomeOfficer is your destination.
Think of Jeff Zbar and Chief Home Officer.com as LifeHacker meets the home office - no matter what home office you run. Entrepreneurs will discover SOHO 2.0 business insight. Teleworkers will learn leading-edge remote work strategies. will spot tips, tales and links on balance. And those considering making the leap into home officing will unearth equal parts reality and validation. Explore. Learn. Return.

The SOHO Sherpa…

ChiefHomeOfficer is your SOHO Sherpa - a guide to all the things that make the Small Or Home Office (SOHO) work. Since 1993, we've chronicled the work-at-home adventure. Today, the site offers honest and occasionally humorous insights, tips, tech/product reviews, and commentary that cut through the "Make Millions From Home" promise and just lay down the real skinny on a lifestyle people can work and live with.

Want to learn more? If you work from home, want to, or are a corporate marketer hoping to talk to those who do, email jeff [at] chiefhomeofficer dot com.

Whether for my home-based business or life in general, I’m no fan of New Year’s Resolutions. I try to constantly resolve to be a better writer, entrepreneur, trusted partner to my clients, and grateful and appreciated husband and dad. Home office dynamics kinda work that way.

Given the downtime we invariably have during the holidays, something resembling a resolution emerged.

It was an office cleaning. Not so much one of those that the garbage men loathe the day after. It was the digital sort, emails and inboxes and documents and the like. So I grabbed my reading glasses and dove in.

With each email reviewed or document unearthed (and filed or shredded), memories and epiphanies personal and professional emerged.

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle: when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

You’ve no doubt heard or read this supposed African proverb. The message is as true for inhabitants of the savanna as it is for those who work in corporate or independent environs.

If entrepreneurship is a marathon, and not a sprint, how can you ensure you’re prepared for the long haul – day by day? Do you have the entrepreneurial endurance to survive the daily sprint – and the career-long marathon.

For some, recurring events provide touchpoints that allow us to refocus on what’s important and build up the “entrepreneurial endurance” needed to get through our days – and our careers. These four might help you on your path…

It takes entrepreneurial endurance to withstand the fits, starts, jabs, and punches of being a home-based or small business soloist in the new economy. Actually, it’s the same in any economy. The year 2016 was supposed to be one of recovery. But learning the lessons of past recessions, many companies retracted and pulled inhouse work that formerly was relegated to contractors.

So how does a soloist learn the lessons of an economy in transition – whether transitioning up or down – to stay the course?

Track long-term patterns. Using Quickbooks or some other accounting or bookkeeping software, take a peek at how busy specific clients have been keeping you. Were there cycles? Was this year different from last year, two years ago, or even further back? You often have the tools at hand to spot the patterns. Use them.

Ask any entertainer or entrepreneur who labored for years to find eventual success, and a common refrain rings true: “It only took me XX years to become an overnight sensation.” But just as success can take time to arrive, troubled waters can arrive without warning.

This presents especially unique challenges for soloists and home-business business owners. A fellow writer recently learned from a long-time corporate client that they were taking their copywriting inhouse.

An independent public relations contractor I know who worked with a Fortune 250 company for more than a decade learned in 2016 they were consolidating all their regional P.R. efforts with their multinational vendor in NYC.

I didn’t escape the year unfazed. In 2015. a large client I’d landed just the year before decided to throw my writing load on the desks of its internal marketing communications team. In February, the impact hit my home office.

Alexa, Evi, Lucida, Siri, Briana, Cortana, Dot, Google Assistant. The female (and other) assistants common to today’s home office are as intriguing as their names are alluring (and yes, I knew a woman named Dot, though I never knew one named Google and Facebook’s “M” conjures images of a James Bond character). Combined with the myriad technology they can connect to wirelessly, they promise to change the way people work and perform in the home office – and the home.

Intelligent Personal Assistants are an increasingly popular genre of software agents designed to help owners by performing services or tasks or providing answers to questions simple and complex. Depending on the query, they can serve up music from local or online services; news, weather, or traffic conditions; or stock or retail prices. They can control heating and air conditioning, lighting, window shades and treatments, surveillance cameras, even appliances, the pool pump, sprinklers, alarm system, or baby monitors – anything connected to the Internet.

Increasingly used as animated avatars in customer service applications, Microsoft Research had been testing its artificial intelligence functions with a virtual receptionist at its corporate headquarters. Whether in the home or office – or home office – these ladies take home and business automation and functionality to whole new levels.